The Top Ten Showstoppers of 2015

Looking back on the theatrical year (meaning the year in theatre, not that the year was being a little showy), some highlights and lowlights come to mind. There were the sold-out sure things that turned out to be godawful (“Finding Neverland,” “China Doll”). There was British royalty: King Henry VIII (care of Hilary Mantel, in “Wolf Hall”), Queen Elizabeth II (care of Helen Mirren, in “The Audience”), and the monarch-to-be of “King Charles III.” There were alcoholic aliens singing David Bowie and grown women playing dogs. And there was “Hamilton.” And more “Hamilton.” Have you seen “Hamilton”? You haven’t?

But, as I flip through my ticket stubs from 2015, because my apartment doesn’t have room for Playbills, what lingers are those moments of transcendent joy, heartbreak, and sheer craft that we call showstoppers. They may not all have literally stopped the show—often the fault of a malfunctioning set piece—but they offered, in one way or another, frissons of the sublime. I’d define a showstopper as any moment so thrilling that the audience is temporarily in the story and out of it, united in a paroxysm of theatrical bliss. A tall order? Perhaps, but here are ten of them.

10. “Totally Fucked” from “Spring Awakening”

Deaf West Theatre’s innovative revival of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s indie-rock musical mixes deaf and hearing actors, who perform in both sign language and spoken English. I waited most of the show to find out what the A.S.L. for “fucked” is, and was disappointed that it isn’t all that vulgar—you could do it in Times Square in an Elmo suit and not get arrested. Otherwise, this triumphant middle finger of a rock anthem was far from a letdown. It’s the moment that Melchior, a nineteenth-century German schoolboy, is caught having written an X-rated pamphlet explaining sexual intercourse. He fesses up, and the entire cast joins in a fit of rebellious nihilism. The song ends with a refrain of “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” the sign language for which is exactly what you’d expect.

9. “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” from “An American in Paris”

Christopher Wheeldon’s choreography was the centerpiece of this sensuous Gershwin musical set in postwar Paris. (A good reminder—Paris is always alive and in love, no matter what happens to it.) Surprisingly, the musical’s most eloquent scene was not the eponymous dream ballet but this razzmatazz number performed by Max von Essen, as Henri, an aspiring crooner and repressed homosexual with dourly puritanical parents. In “Stairway,” Henri’s performance at a humble boîte melts into a sparkling top-hat-and-tails fantasy, but with the hysterical undertow of a nervous breakdown. It reminded me of the “Loveland” sequence from Sondheim’s “Follies,” in which kitschy vaudeville numbers reveal the characters’ unravelling sanity.

8. The ship from “The King and I”

Scenery can be showstopping, too, and the most gasp-worthy moment of Bartlett Sher’s handsome revival at Lincoln Center comes just after the overture: a Victorian ship the size of a house sails toward the lip of the stage with Kelli O’Hara’s Anna in tow, its prow extending above the audience. The Vivian Beaumont is often derided for its cavernous proportions, but in activating the dead space above the spectators’ heads Sher and his set designer, Michael Yeargan, elicited both a traveller’s wonder, as Anna arrives in Siam, and the sweep of history, in the story about to unfold.

7. “I’m Here” from “The Color Purple”

The director John Doyle’s reimagining of the 2005 musical, based on Alice Walker’s novel, reduces the decade-spanning story to its emotional barebones. Against a minimalist set of wooden planks and chairs, the indignities suffered by Celie (Cynthia Erivo) in pre-civil-rights Georgia now feel starker and scarier. “I’m Here” comes toward the end—it’s a true eleven-o’clock number—releasing, like a monsoon rain, all the anger and thwarted pride Celie has kept tamped down. It’s an enormously cathartic moment, not to mention a stirring gospel anthem, delivered with earth-shaking force by Erivo. “I’m beautiful, and I’m here,” she sings. The night I saw the show, someone in the audience hollered back, “You are!”

6. “Suddenly Seymour” from “Little Shop of Horrors”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXfaCWl79xU

Ellen Greene made fanboy dreams come true in July, when she returned to the role that made her famous: Audrey, the skid-row heroine of “Little Shop of Horrors,” staged in a two-night concert by Encores! Off-Center. Greene created the role in 1982, reprised it in the 1986 film, and has been inseparable from it ever since. Still, she had not appeared in a production for some thirty years. Her signature ballad, “Somewhere That’s Green,” was a poignant return to form, but it was the love duet “Suddenly Seymour” that earned ecstatic whoops and cheers, in large part because of the unlikely chemistry between Greene and her Seymour: Jake Gyllenhaal, three decades her junior. A cougar is born.

5. “You’re in the Band” from “School of Rock”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFRPXRhBYOI

If Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of the 2003 Jack Black movie is a heavy-metal “Music Man,” this song is his “Ya Got Trouble.” Inheriting Black’s electric guitar, the exuberant Alex Brightman plays Dewey Finn, a deadbeat rocker who pretends to be a substitute teacher at a preppy elementary school. In this number (seen above in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree video), Dewey “auditions” the kids in his classroom for a new assignment, transforming them, one by one, into a kick-ass rock band. Dewey’s anthem of acceptance is so infectious that, every time Brightman sang “You’re in the band” to one of his charges, I felt the urge to raise my hand from the audience and try to join as well.

4. “The Room Where It Happens” from “Hamilton”

This is not the last of “Hamilton” on this list, but how to narrow down Lin-Manuel Miranda’s abundantly brilliant hip-hop score? The whole musical has show-stopped Broadway history—but you knew that already. What’s less universally acknowledged is that Miranda’s performance, as Alexander Hamilton, isn’t the strongest in the show. The supporting cast is even better, including Jonathan Groff’s arch King George and Daveed Diggs’s superfly Thomas Jefferson. And Leslie Odom, Jr., as Hamilton’s nemesis Aaron Burr, is unforgettable in this song about power and powerlessness. What starts off as Burr’s sidelined summation of the backroom deal that determined the location of the United States' capital builds into an epiphany about his own hunger for influence, which then propels the action (and Hamilton’s life) to its tragic conclusion.

3. “A Musical” from “Something Rotten!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnvF6A2DCAE

At once a parody of showstoppers and a legitimate showstopper itself, this mega-number manages to sample half of the Broadway canon, from “Annie” to “Evita,” “Les Mis,” and “Rent.” A surprise success of the spring season, “Something Rotten!” is as gleefully disposable a crowd-pleaser as they come, telling the story of two hapless Renaissance rivals to Shakespeare who decide to mount the world’s first musical comedy. Where do they get the idea? From a soothsayer named Nostradamus, played with madcap mirth by Brad Oscar. “A Musical” is good fun at the St. James, but it found its true home on the Tony Awards telecast, where it revealed itself as a worthy descendant of classic award-show opening numbers.

2. “Ring of Keys” from “Fun Home”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLman-pE0wU

This wrenching musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir moved to Broadway in March, giving Sam Gold’s production a wider audience and an even deeper resonance. Of Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s heartrending songs, none has more breadth of feeling than “Ring of Keys,” performed by the astonishing child actor Sydney Lucas. Set in a diner, where young Alison spots a butch stranger and experiences the first stirrings of lesbian desire and identification, the song weaves exquisitely through the thrills and hesitations of sexual awakening, filtered through the mind of a girl too young to articulate her contradictory emotions. (“I want…”) When Lucas performed the song at the Tony Awards, it felt not only achingly beautiful but historic.

1. “Satisfied” from “Hamilton”

The jewel of Miranda’s jewel-heavy score, “Satisfied” may be the single best theatrical song written in the past decade. It’s hard to recall any recent show tune that packs in as much verbal wit, narrative surprise, stylistic alacrity, and revelation of character—and it belongs not to Hamilton, not to Burr, but to Angelica Schuyler, played by the incandescent Renée Elise Goldsberry. The song begins with Angelica’s wedding toast—Hamilton is marrying her sister, Eliza—and rewinds to the moment Alexander met them both, and Angelica made a snap decision that sealed her frustrated fate. Her motor-mouthed deconstruction of her own motives is mind-bending in complexity, and when we finally return to that wedding toast it’s heavy with irony. I’ve seen “Satisfied” three times onstage, listened to it maybe a hundred more, and still haven’t tired of its breathtaking nuance. It’s musical storytelling at its best.

By placing Eliza Hamilton front and center, Lin-Manuel Miranda is displacing America’s founding story as the province of white men.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.